Danny Boyle and Alex Garland on '28 Years Later' and how COVID influenced long-awaited sequel

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For more than 20 years, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have fielded questions about their 2002 zombie thriller 28 Days Later and whether they’d ever do a follow-up.

Boyle and Garland joined forces for the first movie that cast Oscar winner Cillian Murphy as one of the lone survivors after a virus outbreak brings death and destruction to London. But the two mostly sat on the sidelines for Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later (though Boyle reportedly shot some sequences on the film and acted as an executive producer).

In past interviews with Postmedia, Garland, who became an Oscar-nominated director in his own right helming such films as Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War and this year’s Warfare, said he had an idea for a third movie, but told us “someone else would need to write it.”

So, it came as a surprise last year when plans were revealed for a new trilogy, the first of which —28 Years Later — is now playing in theatres. The new films are all written by Garland, 55, and tackle big themes involving grief, evil and redemption.

Garland’s initial pitch for the third film sought to take the series in the same direction as the Alien franchise and would have followed the story many years later as military outfits sought to weaponize the “rage virus” that decimated London in the first film.

He scrapped that storyline because “it was generic.”

“Someone had a crack at it and it didn’t quite work,” Garland says of the original concept for 28 Years Later. “Then I had a crack at essentially writing the same story, and it also didn’t work. So, the problem wasn’t with the other writer, it was the story.”

Garland then hatched an idea that “belonged in a spiritual way to the first movie” as it follows a group of uninfected survivors living on a small island connected to the rest of Britain by a single, heavily defended causeway. 

The U.K. is quarantined from the rest of Europe, and isolated from the rest of the world. The infected run loose and survivors have been left to fend for themselves.

The community is thrown into chaos when a young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) travels with his dad (Aaron Taylor Johnson) to the British mainland and learns of a mythical doctor (Ralph Fiennes), who has survived on his own for nearly 30 years and could help his dying mother (Jodie Comer).

Spike’s odyssey sets in motion a story that will span two other films. On Jan. 16, 2026, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a sequel helmed by Nia DaCosta (The Marvels) that was shot back-to-back with its predecessor, will hit theatres.

If the two films prove to be successful, Boyle, 68, will direct the third and final movie with Murphy set to return to conclude his story arc. The Oppenheimer star produces this new entry and will be reintroduced towards the end of The Bone Temple.

Boyle, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind such movies as Yesterday and Slumdog Millionaire, says “there was clearly an appetite” for continuing stories in the 28 Days Later universe. But he and Garland, who also worked together on the 2007 sci-fi thriller Sunshine, were only willing to return if they could tell an original story.

“If we were going to do it, we wanted it to be as original as the first one had been. This first one is indebted to the (George A.) Romero films and the first 28 Days Later. But it stands on its own feet and can be experienced on its own,” he says.

“It has a completely fresh cast. We didn’t need Cillian in the first one … He’ll appear towards the end of the second film and he will be in the third movie. But we didn’t have to carry on with that character. We could start off fresh. For an apocalyptic movie, that moment of ground zero, that feeling of ‘What are we going to begin with?’ is a great place to start,” he says.

28 Days Later was famously shot on digital video, which gave it a documentary feel. The latest film utilizes iPhones – sometimes as many as 20 of them at a time – to immerse audiences in the action.

With a story that was fuelled by the accidental release of a “rage virus” that turns those it infects into frantic, blood-thirsty zombies, Garland says the worldwide response to the real-life COVID-19 pandemic allowed them to think about how humanity could easily slip into a kind of normalcy in a post-apocalyptic world.

“One of the things that the pandemic showed … is how quickly everything can change,” Garland says. “But after the shock of that initial change, you saw how people relaxed, and what they relaxed into in terms of their relationship with risk.”

“When (COVID) started, we all wore masks and gloves and disinfected vegetables,” Boyle adds. “But you can’t remain in that state. That was interesting for our story. There’s risk taking that you wouldn’t necessarily take after 28 days. But after 28 years, you organize a different way of living with the risks, and you understand what they are better and how far you can go … That was a big help to us making the film.”

28 Years Later is now playing in theatres.

mdaniell@postmedia.com